Swami Vivekananda's History of Universal Religion and its Potential for Global Conciliation

Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) brought Vedanta to the US and played a key role in the initial Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893. He did not live long enough to be able to put together what has been achieved by Jean in this volume over a period of more than 45 years in bringing this priceless compilation together from works by and about Swami Vivekananda. In the conclusion to her introduction, Jean notes that the Vedantic approach 'works through a dominantly right brain culture based on millennia of experience and tradition. It documents its historical adjustment to the demands of the left brain in the form of western invasion.' These reflections arose after reading Iain McGilchrist and one realises that colonialisation represented an epistemological imperialism and an assumed superiority of left hemisphere thinking that cannot in fact to penetrate into 'deep inner structures of reality' and even goes so far as to deny their existence – the very rationale of the Galileo Commission to reinstate the proposition that consciousness can access these deeper structures.

On arriving in the US after a British education and therefore inculcated by the dominant western mentality, Vivekananda found 'his western values of materialism, the belief in the supremacy of Western science, the supposed superiority of its systems of logic and materialistic theory of evolution increasingly difficult to assimilate with his own soul.' Jean explains all this personal and historical background and provides some useful diagrams to illustrate non-dualism/non-duality with respect to the individual and Brahman. His teacher Sri Ramakrishna imparted in a global vision of conciliation which he then took forward, including conciliation of East and West, Vedantic and Abrahamic worldviews, both entailing spiritual humanism and a process of spiritualisation whereby subject and object are united in a common ground within a larger process of 'holovution'.

The scope of the book is magisterial, with nine sections and 25 chapters covering every aspect of Swami Vivekanda's life, Vedic culture and its historical roots, basic concepts of reality, the evolution of Vedantic teachings on causation and transmigration, the overall spiritual culture, the fragmentation of the Vedic message in India, reactions to invasion, the arrival of Vedanta in the West and its modern synthesis articulating a vision of oneness and solidarity so necessary for our time: All is One Spirit. The primary appeal of this book will be to scholars of Indian religion, and readers should order it for their local libraries as an invaluable resource on the topic. For the more general reader with time available, the book will repay close study and reflection. There are also extensive cross-references as well as a comprehensive glossary and index. All in all, this is a massively valuable scholarly achievement.